855. How To Find Value In The Challenging Times

Humans need to be challenged in order to feel progress and in order to feel like they are becoming someone else and getting better at something in some way. And so without these challenges, you'll never reach your highest potential, which ultimately is truly what makes a human happy is progress. Welcome to the Earn your happy podcast. I'm Lori Harder, founder of Light Pink, best selling author, three time fitness world champion, and I'm a crazy, multi passionate entrepreneur. My journey has taken me everywhere, from being a broke waitress, barista, retails associate, and personal trainer with massive anxiety and no belief in myself, to later becoming a multimillionaire in love with my life. In 2007, my husband and I lost everything. We found ourselves hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt at rock bottom. We had no ideas and I had no education to fall back on. This is when I found personal development and learned everything I could. Business. Not by choice, but because I realized no one was coming to save me. The conversations on this podcast are going to let you know that you're not alone and that we all feel like we don't know what we're doing. We're going to give you the tools to help you face your fears, take action, start your business, and grow those massive dreams that are keeping you up at night. It's time to create a life that you can't hide from and put so much on the line that your higher self is forced to come out. Going to stop waiting for someone to approve of you, and you're going to anoint yourself. Because I'm obsessed about building businesses that give women a platform. I want to feature you. So if you text the word podcast to 310-496-8363, you can get your questions answered on our Q and A segment along with a shout out. And if you rate, review and subscribe to this podcast, we're choosing someone every month to get coached and and featured on our show. It just might be you. So let's get started. And we're back with another episode of he said she said.

Should we call this Take two?

Take two.

I mean, guys, here's real life podcasting. You'll get two, three minutes into an episode, the dog starts effing with something and it completely throws you off your train of thought and it just turns into frustration and like two middle fingers up and like, let's just start over.

The dog came in and got wrapped in every single cord underneath the podcast desk and was pulling Chris's headphones off.

How can you love and hate an animal at the same time?

So much sometimes, I don't know, it is hilarious. And when he's bad, he's your dog.

I know it does.

And when he's good at that, your.

Dog is doing this. Your dog is doing that. So what we were starting an episode on and what we will have an episode on is this really weird divide, this really weird dichotomy between what you want your days to look like and what they actually have to look like in order to one day eventually earn the right for your days to look however you want them to look.

Yeah. And I want to add the take of what you want your days to look like, but then also what you truly want in your life, what your biggest goals are. And that was where the conversation came from, was my goals, like, truly what I know my soul wants and who I want to be and why I came here does not necessarily match up with what I want my days to feel like, because right now, my days are filled with so much challenge that I don't necessarily feel like I want that every single day.

So before we get to like this epiphany, you had the spoiler alert when we were talking about this on the walk. That's where this came from. Big shocker, right? We're talking about this on a walk. We're asking each other, what would your ultimate day look like day in and day out? Real quick, what would your ultimate day look like day in and day out? At least, what do you think it would look like?

Ultimately, I would love a day where I get to write in the morning, but creatively, it doesn't have to be necessarily on a timeline for anything. It can be about different topics that I feel excited about. I would love to be able to go to coffee with someone who intrigues me, who I can learn from, and also who I can add value with. And I also think it would be really fun to be able to weigh in on different people's businesses. So have a lot of money that I can invest in different businesses and help give business ideas and ideating, that's my actual dream, is to be able to go in and just be able to do all the fun creative marketing side of different things throughout the day.

On the average workday. If you had a billion dollars right now. Right. So you were never working because you had to, when do you think you'd start work and when would you want to end work in that day?

I think I'd start work at 12 and end work at 3 or 4.

You say 1.

Some days I would.

Our life is Kind of close to that. You start at 10, I start 11. Right. Most days we have our protected time ahead of time. I mean, we're getting close, which is kind of cool. And that's because we've controlled our days. But the fact is, if you're working towards a goal, you still have to do things you don't want to do. I think the most disempowering thing when you've got big goals is. Is giving in to instant gratification instead of embracing delayed gratification. Right? So delayed gratification is, I may want something now, but I know I can't start doing it or buy it or receive it until later, and that's delayed gratification.

So when we were chatting, we kept chatting on our walk about just going through this whole process of, why don't our days right now match up with this life that we think we want? With this, Like, I only want to be doing things that are fun, right? We had a couple moments of like, why are things so hard? And I only wanna be doing things that are fun. And I feel like we've been working so hard to have a life that still feels hard, like challenging. Now, don't get me wrong, we love our life. We're obsessed. We are so blessed. It's not even funny. But we do a lot of challenging things throughout the day. And it was the moment when I said, you know, I believe that if we only did things that we wanna do each day, we would eventually get bored because we would lack purpose and challenge. And happiness actually comes from purpose and challenge. I'm putting together a talk right now that I'm gonna do in a couple of weeks. Written out, what do I think makes a happy human? And I really looked at my life and I wrote down all the things that I enjoy, all the things that I love. But then I had this moment of if I was only doing these things that I had written down or the things that I just said, I ultimately would still be missing something. Because humans need to be challenged in order to feel progress and in order to feel like they are becoming someone else and getting better at something in some ways. So without that resistance, there is no way to grow new muscle. There's no way to actually change. And we love change. Like, we love to be able to track progress, see progress and change in our life and get better. And so without these challenges, you'll never reach your highest potential, which ultimately is truly what makes a human happy is progress. Hey, I have to take a quick break because I want to tell you about a podcast that I absolutely love, love. And if you love this podcast, I'm telling you, you're gonna love this girl. So many of you tell me all the time that you totally vibe with, earn your happy because of how real we are and what it actually takes and feels like to chase your big dreams. And that's what we always talk about. We talk about leveling up in your business, in your work, through your mental blocks, and we really support you to get you to where you want to go by being so real with our stories. As you know, while building Light Pink, I've been navigating a whole, whole lot of emotions and really making it a point to share exactly where I'm at in the journey with all of the ups and downs. And I really feel drawn toward other women and female podcasters who are doing the same thing out there because that's what actually works. So if you like this podcast, you're gonna love my friend Keisha Fitzgerald. Podcast called Empower Her. How great is that title? Her podcast is growing like crazy because she's so freaking high vibe and fun, but she's also the type of woman who isn't afraid to pull back the curtain and be really transparent about her journey, building a business, chasing dreams and share with you the tactical tools that help you get from where you are now to where you want to go in your life, career and relationships. She's got incredible guests on her show, but also as a super high energy person, she's got saucy short episodes that she calls pep talks that will light a little fire under your booty to help you do the damn thing. And I think you're going to love her. Find Caisha's podcast wherever you get your podcasts and search, Empower Her. Keisha will be the hype girl and virtual bestie you didn't even know you needed. Let's get back to the show.

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I've got a couple of points to that. People love change because that's the end result. They typically don't like transition. Right? What it takes to get to change. The second point that I thought of when you said that is I think people really underestimate the role of that challenge plays in their happiness. Right? They think a life without challenge would be happy. No, having challenges is part of the equation that brings you happiness, solving things, having purpose, overcoming things, actually brings you those dopamine hits, brings you joy. And, and the important thing is if you had no challenge all the time, you wouldn't feel extra happy because you need challenging times to experience the opposite, which is happy. So there'd be no way to define happy. Your baseline would just be totally different and you'd start taking it for granted. And without challenge, you'd still feel rather unhappy because there's nothing to define what happy would feel like.

I think that if you can think about a time in your life, maybe you've gone on, if you've ever had the opportunity to go on a vacation that was really long, more than two weeks or even 10 days, and you almost get to this place where you're like, I'm kind of bored, or this isn't fun anymore, or I can't do this anymore. You know what's funny is we actually went on a month long vacation a few years back and we went to Europe. I'd never been on a vacation longer than probably 10 days at that point. And I actually had a couple moments where I was like, I don't know what to do with myself. And thankfully along the vacation, we had a lot of learning though. So I do believe that. Challenge, challenge and yes, challenge and learning. So when you look at setting up your days, like when you're like, no, when I get my days like this, that's when I'll be happy. Make sure that you are putting something in there that is also challenging. So I do believe that having projects or having something that you're working towards or a big goal, the thing with that, the thing that I think the sooner we can accept, the happier we can be, is that that when you plan a fulfilled life, it's often not what you think that you want. So what I want this podcast to get across when we were talking about this, like this is what I want to share with people, is it's the acceptance of knowing that challenges each day are actually quite important and not wishing them away and waiting for a life that doesn't have them, because that's not actually a happy life. So embracing the now because I don't want to wait anymore to be living, you know, because I found myself doing the thing that I always do is why I have the podcast I have is to remember to be happy. Now is okay, well, when we do this or when this company sells, or when that company sells, or maybe this investment will pay off, that's when we'll have this life where we're just doing things that we love, and when we actually think about that, that's not what makes you and I happy.

Nope, not at all. It's really interesting. It's reminds me when I was a kid and I played with legos. Like, stay with me here. When you play with Legos, you're building something. And that was the fun part. As soon as I would get it built, it was boring. It sucked. I would destroy it, and I'd want to build something again. And life is very much that way. Trust me. Once you get to the finish line, once you get something built, you actually lose a lot of the excitement, and therefore, you're losing a lot of the happiness. The challenge of finding the missing piece in Legos, the challenge of finding how to fit something together and making this thing come together, even if you don't have the right pieces. That was the fun part. As soon as I get the house built or the motorhome built or whatever I built, airplane built with Legos, I would destroy it because I was bored. And that's very much a great analogy for life.

Yeah. I'm working hard to really embrace everything that's going with light pink, because it's been the challenge of my life. And I'm also. It's such a great place to be because I am so. I've never grown this much so quickly. I just went and spoke at a mastermind, and my girlfriend, Lindsay Schwartz, was like, you change so much every time that you speak, and you add so much more value because of what you're going through right now. You're changing so fast and experiencing so fast that she's like, I can't wait to hear you speak next. Cause you've changed so much in such a short period of time. And I thought, God, that is the coolest thing. That is the coolest compliment I could ever get. And the only reason that that is happening, because I am under so much challenge and pressure that I'm having to become a different person in order to handle it, that it's making me show up different in a better way in all areas of my life.

All right, guys. Well, if you take anything away from this rambling, it's this. The next time that you are frustrated, next time you're challenged, next time you have a day that feels like, oh, it's nothing but a couple of punches in the face, I want you to stop, pause, and ask yourself, how could this actually be contributing to my happiness? And when you change, when you ask a better question, you get a better answer. When you change perspective, you can actually find the role it plays in you getting your happiness. Meantime, thanks for listening. Always love and appreciate you guys. And if you want me to start your day with happiness, every single morning I text thousands and thousands and thousands of you a positive money mantra or positive business perspective. Totally free. Just something Lori told me I should do a while back because I wake her up to a mantra start doing. It went to 30 people, then 300 people, then 3,000 people and now I text thousands of you every morning. So if you want to receive my positive money mantra or business perspective every morning, text me the word daily so I know to throw you on the list. Text me the word daily at 310-421-0416 and I'll text you when I wake up. Yep.

Either that or text the word nudes and he'll also send some of those.

Do you know how many D I'm going to give?

Do not text that God.

Welcome to our world, guys. All right, thanks. Love and appreciate you.

We'll see you next time.